"A City Equal to My Desire"

A City Equal to My Desire is a collection of stories harking back to James Sallis’s early days as a writer of speculative fiction and SF, although all were produced after 1998. The book's front and back cover blurbs suggest that the collection is primarily crime and mystery fiction, which is where James is best known today, but only about a third of the stories are actually crime tales. The rest are speculative fiction and include pieces published in Asimov’s, Fantasy and SF, and Talebones.

In keeping with the marketing, the first two stories in the collection actually are crime fiction. They include “Ukulele and the World’s Pain,” which I thought was the weakest tale in the collection, and the excellent “Drive,” which Sallis later expanded into a novella of the same name that I believe is one of the best noir thrillers ever written.

For me, however, the true gems in the collection are the speculative stories, especially “Roofs and Forgiveness in the Early Dawn,” about an unusual alien invasion, “Pitt’s World,” which tells the story of a survivor of a spaceship crash, and “Telling Lives,” about a writer who has discovered a niche for himself in writing biographies of everyday people. Another great story is "Day’s Heat,” which features an unusually close set of triplets and ties with “Roofs and Forgiveness…” for my personal favorites.

Wonderful characters and character interactions are Sallis's strengths, but we also find lovely language and beautiful imagery. Be aware, however, that these are literary quality stories and the endings may not be as clear cut as some genre readers would prefer. Since I love Sallis's creativity and verve, I don't mind the lack of neat and tidy endings. His characters are alive and his tales stir both the emotions and the imagination. I highly recommend them.

Opinionated Book Reviews

I thought I might review a few books that have to do with writing. Hope you don’t mind some strong opinions.

Ray Bradbury: Zen in the Art of Writing: RATING = C+: I was disappointed in this book. I’d heard the title mentioned years ago and built up an image of what a fine book it must be from Bradbury. Maybe I expected too much. The essays are almost all ones I’ve seen before, and most are quite slight in content. Bradbury talks much about his technique of writing down a series of evocative nouns, (the fog horn, the attic, etc.) and then using them to trigger a story. I've tried this and it works. But there wasn't much else of help. The book is a "cheerleading" work, meant to keep up the writer's spirits while they languish in the slush pile. There was considerable autobiographical material on Bradbury, which I liked. The title essay is the strongest.

James Sallis: Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson - David Goodis – Chester Himes: RATING = A: I've mentioned Sallis's work before, primarily for his mysteries. Difficult Lives¬ is a non-fiction biography of three 1950's detective novelists, including Himes, who was black. The book was issued by a small company called "Gryphon Press," but deserves a wider audience. I thought it was excellent, poetical in places, and with strong insights into the characters of these writers. The portraits of the first two, Thompson and Goodis, are also filled with their connections to alcohol, which many have noted seems to be a close friend/enemy of some writers. I asked Jim about Himes and alcohol, and he said there probably was a connection but that he didn't have enough information to be sure. Recommended, if you can find a copy.

Tim Underwood & Chuck Miller, Editors: Feast of Fear; Conversations with Stephen King: RATING = C+: This book spans King's career and the interviews are generally well done and ask the right questions. The downside is that all of it has been said before. I didn't learn anything new about King, but I'd say it would be hard to do so considering his saturation point has long since been reached. This is mainly only for hardcore King freaks.

Douglas Winter: Stephen King: The Art of Darkness: RATING = B: This is an old book (1986) but if you like King then you’ll probably enjoy it. It was easy reading and gave a good amount of biographical background. I read it because of my interest in writers in general, but didn't find terribly much of use here. It pretty much is what it seems, an ode to Stephen King.

Jack Woodford: Trial and Error: RATING = D-: If you’ve ever thought about writing, then I urge you desperately to never touch this book, and if you are ever given a copy throw it immediately in the garbage. This is the worst type of cynical tripe, utterly useless to anyone who wants to write serious material. If you follow its directions you might find yourself selling a few things here and there. If you have some talent you might even sell quite a bit. But none of it will be memorable, and unless you are totally without soul you will despise yourself for it. Woodford insults readers, writers, editors, and just about everyone else you can name. I have no doubt he is showing the writing world as he saw it, and a bleak and terrible hell it is. He never lies and tells anyone that he’s going to show them how to write, only how to make money from writing. (That’s why he gets a D- instead of an F.) He tells you to throw out your vocabulary. Even a person with a high school education knows 1000s of more words than he needs. He says never to rewrite. He says to steal time from your other job to "knock off" a short story or two. He is the archetype of a hack. In the end I feel sorry for the fellow. His real name was Josiah Pitts Woolfolk, and he died with $56 dollars to his name. He had been in Federal prison for a time for mail fraud, and in the end was typing but not selling from a seedy hotel in Richmond, Virginia. He died at 77, with his one apparently memorable piece of writing being this book. How depressing.

From "Renderings"

Taking a little break from David Morrell's thrillers, I started reading a novella by James Sallis called Renderings. I have very little idea what's going on in the story, but I've never minded being lost with Sallis. The trail may not be cut neat and tidy and paved, but you know there'll be great vistas along the way and that you'll end up somewhere interesting.

The main character in Renderings is a writer, and at one point we hear the following thoughts:

"Walking in the hills today I thought how surprised our old professors would be at the way I write. Suckled on New Critics, they believed the writer a master manipulator, a kind of conjurer, every word and motion bent inexorably to the final effect. I believed it too, but when I began to write, from this side of the door, that all collapsed. The only way I could do it was by winging it; if I knew things ahead of time, I simply couldn't make myself write. From page to page, word to word, I never knew what would happen. I still don't."

Although this is a character speaking, I suspect strongly that this is the way Sallis himself works. Thus my comments about the meandering path. Of course, I think this approach to writing works better with Sallis's more literary fiction than it would for something like a genre action/thriller (without extensive rewriting). I can't, however, decide whether it is more of a comfort or an anxiety to work this way. It's actually comforting to not have to plot, to not worry over what happens next and what follows that, to just open a vein as they say. But it's also worrisome. Writing takes work, and what if you write yourself into a corner three/quarters of the way through a book? How much time and effort might you waste when a little forethought would have saved you?

Maybe there's a reason why Jim's work is mostly novella length. Maybe there's a reason why many of my favorite reads are on the shorter side of novel length. As a reader, I feel the passion, the exploration, the freedom that writer's such as Jim Sallis bring to their work. There's nothing mechanical, no place where you become aware that Screw A goes into Part B. The work grows around you, grows over you, as if you're a fallen log lying quietly in the forest as the seasons pass.